Consulting Guidelines For High Energy and Burnout Prevention article is out. The article’s objectives:

• State the risk of the burnout
• Rationalize the need for high energy
• List guidelines for maintaining high energy

Here is the abstract:

As a consultant you constantly run a high risk of burnout. Regardless of the billing model – hourly rate, fixed fee, or retainer – the time is your core currency and  it runs against you. Collecting requirements, researching on available technologies, developing proof of concept, fixing technical problems, implementing – that’s technical  part that takes lots of energy. Influencing without authority, resolving conflicts, learning to understand folksonomy for each new gig, performing required mundane work, defending your approach and adapting to others’, reporting to high ranks folks is another soft skills aspect of work that requires even more energy. Spending so much energy is a surefire path for energy drainage and as a result – the burnout. When you hit this point of burnout your results won’t be as impactful at best. In the end the burnout would lead to disengagement from your gigs and contract termination. You need a plan for how to preserve your energy resources and how to avoid burnout so you could deliver high impact results in sustainable manner. Here is the plan – let your passion drive, reuse at scale, prioritize catalyst work over drainage work, manage time.

What’s your practices to preserve your energy while keeping up with the high pace?

image by Adriano Arruguetti

Following JD’s coverage on Stephen Covey Speaks at Microsoft I discovered that Stephen Covey is building his social network of most highly effective people

If you sing up (free of charge) you get the chance to be coached by Stephen Covey in very systematic way:

Stephen Covey Is Blogging

I also enjoy the blog.

My favorites so far are (guess why?):

• The High Cost of Low Trust 
  • 3 Most Precious Things In The World Are Free
  • Grow Quality – Not Quantity
• Become the Leader of Your Boss.
  • Manage Your Manager For Fun And For Profit
• How to strike a work and life balance
  • Focus On Results, Avoid Workaholism – My 4 Simple Rules
• And the winner is Knowledge Workers: 10,000 Times the Productivity 
  • The Fast And The Peaceful
  • The Secret Behind GTD [Getting Things Done] Revealed

I liked this post most because of its starting quote:

‘The top software developers are more productive than average software developers not by a factor of 10X or 100X or even 1000X but by 10,000X.’ Quality knowledge work is so valuable that unleashing its potential offers organizations an extraordinary opportunity for value creation.” – Nathan Myhrvold, former chief technology officer at Microsoft

Join The Beta

Stephen Covey invites to participate in beta launch of the Covey Community.

Are you in? Are you joining other more than 8,000 highly effective community members? I am in.